Month: September 2021

Jonathan Mirsky, Journalist and Historian of China, Dies at 88

Chin@Strategy

Dr. Mirsky managed to dictate his article by phone. The next morning he cycled back to Tiananmen, where he saw soldiers shoot parents who were trying to enter the square to look for children who had not returned home. He said he also saw soldiers shoot doctors and nurses who had come to the scene to help the injured. (Many China scholars still regard as unresolved how many people were killed in the crackdown and where they died; estimates range from the hundreds to the thousands.) “Tiananmen Square became a…

New Limits Give Chinese E-Gamers Whiplash

Chin@Strategy

Many in China’s gaming industry agree that games have some downsides. The most popular games in the country are made for smartphones and are free to play, meaning the businesses making them live and die based on how well they draw users in and get them to pay for extras. The game makers have become experts at hooking players. But top-down attempts to wean children off games — what state media has called “poison” and “spiritual pollution” — have sometimes been worse than the problem itself. Boot camps fond of…

Chinese police take away HNA chairman, CEO on suspicion of crimes

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SHANGHAI, Sept 24 (Reuters) – China’s HNA Group, once one of the country’s most acquisitive conglomerates, said on Friday that its chairman and its chief executive had been taken away by police due to suspected criminal offences. The company, placed in bankruptcy administration in February, said in a statement on its official WeChat account it had been notified by police in its home province of Hainan, southern China, that Chairman Chen Feng and CEO Tan Xiangdong had been taken. read more “The operations of HNA Group and its member companies…

How Record Rain and Officials’ Mistakes in China Led to Drownings on a Subway

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ZHENGZHOU, China — The heaviest hour of rainfall ever reliably recorded in China crashed like a miles-wide waterfall over the city of Zhengzhou on July 20, killing at least 300 people, including 14 who drowned in a subway tunnel. In the aftermath, regional and national officials initially suggested that little could have been done in the face of a storm of such magnitude. But an analysis of how the authorities responded that day, based on government documents, interviews with experts and Chinese news reports, shows that flaws in the subway…

To Get Back Meng Wanzhou, China Uses a Hardball Tactic: Seizing Foreigners

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In a rapid-fire climax to a 1,030-day standoff, China prepared to welcome home a company executive whose arrest in Canada and possible extradition to the United States made her a focus of superpower friction. In getting her back, Beijing brandished a formidable political tool: using detained foreign citizens as bargaining chips in disputes with other countries. The executive, Meng Wanzhou, was set to land in China on Saturday night local time to a public that widely sees her as a victim of arrogant American overreach. By the same turn, Michael…

Who Is Meng Wanzhou?

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When Meng Wanzhou was arrested by the Canadian authorities in the Vancouver airport while changing flights December 2018, she suddenly became one of the world’s most famous detainees. Her arrest — made at the United States’ request for her extradition on fraud charges — provoked a storm of recriminations from China, landed Ms. Meng in legal limbo, and put Canada in the middle of a fight between two world powers. Ms. Meng has been a public face of Huawei. She began her career there more than 25 years ago and…

U.S. Reaches Agreement to Release Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou

Chin@Strategy

For its part, the Chinese government has underwritten the cost of installing Huawei gear, in an effort to dominate networks from Latin America to the Middle East. Ms. Meng came to personify that effort. Her determination to wire up Tehran, at a time in which the West was seeking to contain Iran’s nuclear program, attracted protests among American officials. For that reason, some China hard-liners objected on Friday to news that the charges were being dropped. “It sends the wrong message to Chinese business executives around the world that it’s…